At this moment, any Republican official or strategist who spends a lot of time thinking about Donald Trump taking on Ron DeSantis in the 2024 presidential election is putting the cart before the horse — there’s still a midterm-election cycle to win. Yes, right now the outlook suggests a tsunami-size GOP wave, but nothing is guaranteed in life. In fact, the best way for Republicans to blow opportunities in a near-ideal political environment like this one is to start taking things for granted.
With that in mind, a reader wondered if Trump’s influence in the GOP would wane if the Republicans he picked out of contested primaries, such as Mehmet Oz and Herschel Walker, lose contests that Republicans thought they had a good shot of winning. That could happen, but the average person who wants Trump to run again and win in 2024 isn’t backing him because they think he’s the best candidate recruiter.
A more interesting question is in a Trump-DeSantis race, which Republican candidate would get more hostile coverage from the mainstream media? In the 2016 cycle, as soon as Donald Trump announced, the mainstream media was obsessed with him. It wasn’t often positive coverage, but instantly Trump became the protagonist of the story. Other GOP candidates with longer resumes and more detailed policy proposals like Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, and Rick Perry could barely get any attention, compared to Trump having his speeches broadcast live in their entirety on CNN. As Erik Wemple observed back then, “the live shot of an empty and soon-to-be-occupied Trump podium has become one of the iconic images of campaign 2016.”
One of the reasons Trump won the 2016 Republican presidential primary was that he received way, way, way more coverage than any of his GOP rivals:
Mr. Trump earned $400 million worth of free media last month, about what John McCain spent on his entire 2008 presidential campaign. Paul Senatori, mediaQuant’s chief analytics officer, says that Mr. Trump “has no weakness in any of the media segments” — in other words, he is strong in every type of earned media, from television to Twitter.Over the course of the campaign, he has earned close to $2 billion worth of media attention, about twice the all-in price of the most expensive presidential campaigns in history. It is also twice the estimated $746 million that Hillary Clinton, the next best at earning media, took in. Senator Bernie Sanders has earned more media than any of the Republicans except Mr. Trump.
There are several reasons media institutions who aren’t fans of Republicans covered Trump so extensively. He was a celebrity, and he brought in ratings. As CBS executive chairman Leslie Moonves put it, Trump’s candidacy “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” He was unpredictable, exciting, and didn’t bother with boring, dry policy proposals. And indisputably, a lot of folks in media thought Trump would be the easiest candidate for Hillary Clinton to defeat. (Joke’s on them!)
As much as Trump bashed the major mainstream-media institutions and they ripped into him, both sides developed this symbiotic, codependent relationship with the other. It was as if each side had decided that their mission in life was to fight the other, and lacked a sense of purpose without that all-consuming foe.
In 2024, which Republican will be perceived by the media as the easiest rival for Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris, or some other Democrat to defeat? I suspect it will be Trump, who just lost a presidential election, will be getting into his late 70s, who won’t stop obsessively ranting about how he was the real winner in the 2020 election, and whose actions and words led to the January 6 Capitol Hill riot. And who knows, maybe instances such as the Oz endorsement and demonization of Brian Kemp demonstrate that Trump has lost his instinct for what grassroots Republicans want.
Compared to Trump, DeSantis looks solidly conservative, wonky and interested in policy, nimble and articulate, and unafraid of challenging conventional wisdom on issues such as the pandemic. DeSantis doesn’t appear to watch a lot of cable news, doesn’t rage-tweet, and doesn’t seem to be making a lot of enemies within his own party. DeSantis has his own combative streak, but it seems a lot more focused on getting tangible results.
We’ve already seen the predictable “DeSantis is more dangerous than Trump” takes from liberals at MSNBC. Michael A. Cohen warns, “DeSantis brings something to the table that Trump lacks — his ability to translate political vindictiveness, cruelty and demagoguery into policy results.” That sounds like a bitter progressive’s way of saying that DeSantis gets stuff done and doesn’t just sit around throwing tantrums on social media.
Then again, many members of the media have grown to loathe DeSantis as much as they hate Trump. Maybe, after nearly eight years of nonstop Trump news, some members of the media are tired of whatever is on Trump’s mind dominating the news cycle, day after day. Maybe some members of the media remember 2016 and how foolish they were to assume that Trump was unelectable.
The typical Republican may hate the mainstream media, but that doesn’t mean the mainstream media don’t have considerable influence over who Republicans nominate for president.